After
I found the first Cadfael novel, A Morbid Taste for Bones, at Abids in November last year (chronicled here) and started reading it, I found myself getting drawn into this medieval world
of 12th century England. I
liked the novel a lot and wanted more. I
looked around and found more, but exercised restraint bought only the next
three in the series from an online used books portal (chronicled here). I finished reading the second too, One
Corpse too Many.
After
I read the two Cadfael novels, I felt immense respect for the writer Ellis
Peters (pseudonym of Edith Pargeter).
How carefully and cleverly she has created this world and put this
Benedictine monk as a detective in this world.
She gives him a background that furnishes him with wide-ranging worldly
experience and an array of skills. He
decides to take the cowl and become a monk when he is in his forties. Shrewsbury becomes his area of operations and
the Benedictine Abbey there his home thereafter. It is a world where there is no electricity
and no ‘technology,’ that is so much part of crime detective novels of this
age. But the medieval world had its own
technology, and Cadfael is a master of that technology. He knows his metals and weapons, chemicals,
wood; he knows the human body; he knows about food and drink; his knowledge of
medicinal herbs and concoctions comes from his days stationed in Jerusalem
working in a herbarium. And he is
patient and observant, and since he entered the cloister at a much later age
after experiencing a lot that the world had to offer, knowing humans and their
weaknesses and strengths, he is much tolerant, far more lenient and
even-tempered, unlike many senior monks who had entered the cloister as novices
and had no idea of the outside world and its people.
I
knew that there were more Cadfael novels out there on the same portal, and the
prices seemed all right for me. I let go
off all restraint and bought ten of them, the rest of the lot on that portal
actually. This lot came in towards the
end of December last year.
 |
| Look at the covers of the Cadfael novels in this edition ... each looks a set piece, nicely framed ... and the scroll at the bottom the picture ... |
 |
| Look at the covers of this set ... similar, no? I have only three in this set, but I checked most of the covers of other Cadfael mysteries in this set, and all have a prone body on the cover ... |
I
had finished the second novel by the time this package arrived and the first
thing I did was to read A Rare Benedictine, a set of three
stories. The first story, A Light in the Road to Woodstock, gives
us Cadfael’s backstory, the last part where he decides to become a monk,
putting an end to his career as a soldier.
This story also sets the historical and political background for the
rest of the series, a period that is termed as ‘Anarchy’ in English history. There are two other stories too, sort of
Cadfael’s early ‘cases’ in Shrewsbury.
Ellis Peters wrote these stories ten years after the first Cadfael novel
appeared, and after fifteen Cadfael novels.
There are references to people in and places of his pre-monastic life in
these novels but no details. Ellis
Peters writes in her introduction to these stories that despite expectations she
didn’t want to write a full-length novel about Cadfael’s past, but only that
brief period of transition where soldier Cadfael becomes Brother Cadfael.
After
two blockbuster surprises where I got author signed copies of novels (Ian Rankin
and George Lamming), I now look very carefully at the second-hand books that I buy at Abids or
receive by post. There was a small
surprise in this lot. The erstwhile
owner of this copy of St. Peter’s Fair, a Cadfael novel
enthusiast and admirer of the author presumably, has carefully cut out a fairly
lengthy obituary of the author (who passed away in 1995) from a newspaper and
pasted it at the inside back page of the novel; ‘1995’ in pen is visible on the
top.
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